Not ready to upgrade from RHEL 7? 4 years of Extended Life Cycle Support is now available

There’s rarely a good time to upgrade your enterprise operating system (OS). It takes time and attention, which are probably already stretched thin with priority work.

Resource constraints aren’t the only thing that can put upgrade or migration plans on hold. Many users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 have critical workloads depending on the OS, and they can’t afford any downtime. Others are hung up by their organization’s dependence on third-party applications or services that haven’t yet been certified for more recent RHEL releases.

For RHEL 7 customers who were unable to upgrade by June 30, 2024—the end of its maintenance support— there’s an option. We’re now offering 4 years of Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) with RHEL 7.

Carry on, with confidence

With the RHEL 7 ELS Add-On, you can continue to use RHEL 7.9 until June 30, 2028, giving you more time to prepare for a full upgrade. The add-on entitles subscribers to security fixes classified as Critical or Important, other selected priority bug fixes and troubleshooting support.

Those security fixes deserve a little more exploration. Red Hat rates security issues on a 4-point severity scale. The ELS Add-On entitles you to get fixes for common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) rated Important and Critical—the 2 highest severity levels. Important CVEs can compromise the confidentiality, integrity or availability of your resources. Critical CVEs can expose resources to remote, unauthenticated attackers or allow systems to be compromised without user interactions.

The recent OpenPrinting CUPS vulnerabilities are good examples. Those CVEs were rated Important by Red Hat, and we delivered a fix for RHEL 8 and RHEL 9, which are still fully supported. We also delivered a fix for RHEL 7 customers with the ELS Add-On. Those on RHEL 7 without ELS must find and fix the vulnerability manually. Similarly, if you still have systems running on CentOS Linux, which also reached end of life on June 30, 2024, you won’t get patches delivered. If you’re ready to migrate those systems, look at our migration offering, which provides an economical way to convert to RHEL 7 and get ELS in a single offering.

With ELS, you’ll also get continued access to our support organization including the Red Hat Customer Portal and Knowledge Base, where our experts and other RHEL users share tips and solutions.

Please note that the RHEL 7 ELS Add-On is only available to RHEL 7.9 users. It covers IBM Z and x86 architecture (64-bit only). It includes maintenance for Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Resilient Storage Add-Ons. You can learn more about the ELS maintenance policy here.

If you’re using RHEL 7.9 on a public cloud, getting the RHEL 7 ELS Add-On is straightforward. It’s available in the AWS (NA/Global, EMEA) and Microsoft Azure (NA/Global, EMEA) marketplaces.

But this is a reprieve, not a resolution

The RHEL 7 ELS Add-On is a valuable option for organizations whose priorities or existing investments make an upgrade impossible right now. But it’s important to remember that extended support isn’t a permanent solution. Customers who need to use this option should use the next four years to prepare for a move to a newer RHEL version.

RHEL 9 is the operating platform for modern enterprise IT. Built with upstream communities and backed by a vast ecosystem of hardware and software partners, it incorporates smart automation tools, simplifies security and compliance and lets you run complex workloads with consistency—from the datacenter, to the cloud, to the edge.

And upgrading to RHEL 9 may be easier than you think. We offer options for in-place upgrades (with the Leapp utility) or full-scale migrations. In either case, Red Hat Consulting Services has the expertise and experience to help you upgrade with minimal disruption.

Learn more about the RHEL 7 ELS Add-On